You could be forgiven for thinking the front-page of Wikipedia is sponsored by the Gibraltar Tourist Board, with the territory given the kind of product placement large corporations can only dream of. Now Wikipedia's self-styled "spiritual leader" Jimmy Wales has publicly stated that he wants the Wikipedians' curious enthusiasm …

Not very effective advertising

Wikipedia is my browser home page and I read the DYKs every morning over breakfast. It's usually the most interesting section.

If you had asked me "guess who's spamming DYK with excessive articles?" I would not have said Gibraltar - I would have immediately said the Indonesian Classic Film Society. Because there's something about an Indonesian / Dutch East Indian film or actor every day it seems. There's nothing sinister about this - it means that someone who's interested in Indoniesian film is doing a lot of article expansion and making regular submissions to DYK. Before Indonesian film it was Eurovision Song Contest entrants.

If Gibraltar are paying someone to promote the country via DYK, they should stop, not because it breaks the rules but because they're doing a rubbish job. I've noticed several trends over the years including the two above, and I haven't noticed Gibraltar items at all. Let alone been tempted to visit. 17 articles in a month occupies a tiny amount of space - DYK generally changes all its articles four times a day, meaning each item will last only 6 hours before disappearing forever, and there can be anything from 6-8 articles in each batch. So 17 out of 700-900 articles. Not very effective.

Gibraltar

The problem with the Wikipedia pages about Gibraltar in the past has been that they have been controlled by a bunch of Spanish editors, some in the employ of the Spanish foreign ministry who gamed the system to show things 'their way' and conspired to get any contentious Gibraltarian editors excluded.

I was banned for a year for insisting that Gibraltar is self governing - which it is.

Mr Bamkin was employed to train a number of unpaid local editors to create pages for Gibraltarpedia in a project sponsored by the Gibraltar museum, as they worked hard and created lots of pages its no doubt been featured heavily on wikipedia.

Naturally the forces of darkness have reacted in the same way Spain seeks to prevent Gibraltar joining UEFA contrary to court rulings. Despite their economic mess they have money to spend on Gib bashing.

I do not edit anything on Mr Wale's dodgy factbook anymore or donate money and free news pictures.

I once visited Gibraltar

Why Bother

So some buffoon in a burst of desperation for money abuses his position with Wikipedia, get's caught and fired. Who expects Wikipedia to be perfect, who expects anything to be perfect. What is important here is abuse was discovered coming from a trustee and the board moved forward appropriately and removed that trustee, that's what proper governance is all about.

Not some foolish expectations of perfection, it just don't happen but sound corrections in management when problems are discovered.

The crazy right babble that has infected right wing talking points that everything must be perfect, you can never disclose problems, is getting out of hand.